Vincent and Amalberti in their excellent book Safer Healthcare, Strategies for the Real World (2016) outline three different approaches to safety in a neat comparative diagram on p. 29

You can download this wonderful text here for free (https://qi.elft.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/safer-healthcare-charles-vincent-and-rene-amalberti.pdf).

The three models are comparative within the context of health care. However, the same could be stated for any environment like Youth Work, Community Services or Social Work where the risk of death is high and contingent of worldview of the so called ‘helpers’.

The first thing I did when I established Galilee was to ensure that we hired no crusaders. The last thing needed in any helping service is someone who wants to ‘save’ others.

The worst semiotic in safety is the image of the hero/heroine (https://safetyrisk.net/why-would-you-want-to-be-a-safety-geek-or-hero/).

Nothing is more toxic to safety than gurus, heroes and a ‘safety hero academy’ (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-superhero-academy/).

If one wants to strike a balance in tackling risk, the last person you want on the team is someone who identifies as safety (https://safetyrisk.net/you-are-not-the-sum-of-safety/). Fortunately, these people stand out easily by calling themselves ‘safety Bruce’, ‘safety Sue’, ‘safety geek’ or similar identities of a mental health disorder.

If safety is your life (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-is-not-your-life/), the best thing to do is to go and get another life. Safety doesn’t need you.

In this comparative chart of three approaches we also see the typical misnaming of the middle and balanced view as proposed by Weick (https://safetyrisk.net/weick-collection/).

It’s such a shame that so few in safety actually read Weick comprehensively. Instead, most in safety read Weick selectively so that they obtain some notion of High Reliability Organisation (HRO) that doesn’t exist.

Weick never supported the idea of such a notion.

Weick always wanted the activity of tackling risk to be continuous and never static. The best way to describe Weick’s understanding is NOT by an organisation (objective) but by organising (process).

There is no HRO, there is only HROing.

The importance of this table for Vincent and Amalberti is that there is no ‘one size fits all’.

Some excellent sections of this book are as follows:

• What Do We Mean by Harm? P.39
• What Are We Trying to Learn When We Analyse Incidents? P.47
• What Options Do We Have for Improving Safety? P.59
• Managing Risk in the Real World p.151

Here are some vital questions:

• What is the point of tackling risk in a method that is out of this world?
• What is the point of ultra-safety? When we know it doesn’t work.
• What is the point of hyper-safety when it creates new trade-offs and by-products and simply shifts risk elsewhere?
• What is the point of developing safety to such a level that it makes people more fragile and less intelligent about risk?

Taleb also tackled these questions in his excellent book Antifragile (http://kgt.bme.hu/files/BMEGT30M400/Taleb_Antifragile__2012.pdf).

In SPoR, we try to get away from any models that make ultra-safety and hyper-safety the foundation for discourse in risk, eg. 1% safer, zero, blame fixes nothing. Parading absolutes such as these simply draws Safety back into myths of pyramids, Jenga blocks and curves, as if Nirvana is a safety reality. As if fallibility is NOT a reality (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/fallibility-risk-living-uncertainty/).

SPoR Reading Group on Ultra-Safety

If you want to learn more about the perils of Ultru-safety and Hyper-safety perhaps you’d like to join the SPoR Book Club that soon tackles the work of Taleb’s book Antifragility?

You can get more details here: https://safetyrisk.net/social-psychology-of-risk-book-club-antifragile/

Or email Matt Thorne directly at: Matt@riskdiversity.com.au